Mobile app search company Quixey, which has been focused on solving the challenges with app discovery, and counts among its customer base names like Ask.com and Sprint, confirmed today it has raised $60 million in a strategic Series C1 funding round led by Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba. Other investors in the round included SoftBank, GGV, Goldman Sachs. To date, this additional… Read More

Google may be soon adding more offline and private sharing features to its Google+ Photos service. It has acquired Odysee, an iOS and Android app that let users automatically back up photos and videos taken on their cameras or tablets to their home computers. It also let users set up private, automatic sharing with other people, and it had an API for integrating the service with other… Read More

Koru is a Seattle-based talent marketplace that helps college grads find jobs at tech companies by putting them through an intensive business program. As the company today announced, it has raised an $8 million Series A round led by Maveron, with participation from new investors City Light Capital and Trilogy Equity Partners, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures and First Round. Read More

SpaceX, the space exploration startup helmed by ex-PayPal founder Elon Musk, has confirmed that it has raised $1 billion in new funding, in a round including Google and Fidelity, who join existing investors Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jervetson, Valor Equity Partners and Capricorn. Google and Fidelity get a ownership stake just shy of 10 percent in exchange for their investment. A report… Read More

Today Apple topped the $700 billion value market cap threshold during regular trading, a remarkable achievement. The company’s shares have since slipped some, but it’s impossible to deny the technology giant’s massive rally. Apple, a company that was once small enough to be dismissed whole-cloth is now not only the world’s most valuable technology company, it’s… Read More

Earlier this year Google acquired DeepMind in the UK to expand the work that it is doing in artificial intelligence, and today the company announced that it is making some more significant moves to build this out even further. It is acqui-hiring the two academic teams of founders, seven people in all, behind Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory, two deep learning startups based in the UK, and… Read More

Google today announced that it has acquired Firebase, a backend service that helps developers build realtime apps for iOS, Android and the web that can store and sync data instantly. Firebase currently has almost 110,000 registered developers on its platform and the Firebase team says that the service will continue to work as before and remain platform-agnostic. Read More

It’s rare that a company can stay relatively secretive while raising a huge amount of funding, but Florida’s Magic Leap has managed that. The startup, led by CEO Rony Abovitz, announced today the close of its $542 million Series B, featuring investors led by Google, Inc., and including KPCB, Andreessen Horowitz, Obvious Ventures, Qualcomm and Legendary Entertainment.
The list of… Read More

Update: Microsoft pulled it off, and at the time of writing (2:45 pm London, 9:45 am New York), Microsoft is worth more than Google. We’ll check back in at the end of the day: – Google and Microsoft are currently locked in a dogfight to be the second-most valuable technology company in the world. Following Google’s less-than-awesome earnings report, combined with a… Read More